On 10/03/17 09:03, Saša Janiška wrote:
John Kitchin <jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
Could you be more specific about what kind of richness you are looking
for?
In a general sense…iow, it’s a fact that rst markup is richer than
e.g. Markdown. Probably, Asciidoc(tor) also provides more semantic
richness and make it suitable markup for longer docs/books, so I wonder
where one can put org-mode’s markup on this scale?
Sincerely,
Gour
I write legal textbooks (up to 600 printed pages) using org-mode. They
are structurally simple (no sidebars, no illustrations, no computer
code). On the other hand, they have lots of citations and internal cross
references. Org-mode is the best for this kind of work because of the
flexible outline structure, not just collapsing and expanding, but the
"hoisting" facility that allows me to focus on smaller sections. The
org-ref module does its work, and the internal cross referencing is the
best.
I recently assisted a friend to put together a memoir that he wanted to
publish as ePub and print. It had lots of pictures. He had originally
typed it in Word and it was a nightmare. Images would not stay put, even
the typeface would change. The on-line publishers like Lulu rejected it.
We reformatted in in Pandoc Markdown and produced a very nice result. I
would have preferred org-mode, but he had never been near Emacs. We got
good ePub, xhtml and print from a single manuscript.
I have also written in rst: it is a slightly richer language out of the
box with provisions for sidebars, cautions, etc, but unless you really
need those things, I would stick with org-mode. I find the syntax of rst
to be very fiddly. Most of the special effects can be obtained with css
in any case.
The only problem that I have had is converting org-mode to Word files as
required by my publisher. The ODT export module is fiddly and often
chokes on my longer documents. When it does choke, it is hard to trace
the problems. Markdown + Pandoc seems much better in this regard, but
the outlining features in Emacs do not seem to be as good for the
Markdown mode. To get a decent export in my latest manuscript I had to
export to LaTeX then use ht4tex. Not a pretty workflow.
I would say Markdown if you are collaborating with someone not familiar
with Emacs. The Pandoc version will do a surprising amount. Org-mode
for nearly everything else, but if you need more, go on to LaTeX.
This may be more than you wanted to know :-).
Regards,
Alan
--
Alan L Tyree http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan
Tel: 04 2748 6206 sip:typh...@iptel.org
